hunter12_methods vs trends

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Unpackaging the past:‘CLT’ through ELT J keywords

Duncan Hunter and Richard Smith

ELT history is often viewed as a succession of methods, but such a view tendsto rest on a ‘packaging up’ and labelling of complex and often contested pastdevelopments. This process ignores both continuity with earlier developments

and diversity of contemporary opinion and often seems to serve as a way toclear the ground for self-proclaimed ‘progress’. This article describes a studythat was undertaken to promote an alternative view of the past. Taking asa starting point the way communicative language teaching (CLT) seems tobe currently in the process of being packaged up in readiness for the ‘dustbinof history’, the study combined corpus-based and qualitative procedures toexplore keywords in ELTJ articles during the early communicative period.By identifying themes discussed by contemporary writers themselves, wehighlight areas of continuity with ‘pre-communicative’ methodology, anddiversity within the communicative discussion itself, thus subverting the

assumption that there was ever a wholly distinct, unitary, or ‘classical’ CLT tobe lightly superseded.

Introduction: against‘packaging up’ of theELT past

Aside from Howatt’s (1984) A History of English Language Teaching ,issued in a second edition in 2004 (Howatt with Widdowson 2004),there have been very few attempts to survey the ELT professional pastwhich do not adopt an essentially methods-based perspective. Thevery popular books by Larsen-Freeman (1986/2000) and Richardsand Rodgers (1986/2001), used as core texts for teacher training inmany countries, are the best-known examples of a general tendency

in the profession to ‘package up’ the past by assigning method labelsto bounded periods of history. Past methods are presented as fixedsets of procedures and principles, with little attention being paidto the contexts in which these developed, the way alternatives weredebated at the time, or indeed the extent to which there was continuitywith previous periods. Both of these books describe how, one afteranother, discrete sets of ideas and practices came to prominence inthe language teaching profession, only to be replaced—seemingly enbloc —by a new method when the underlying theories were superseded.The structure of Larsen-Freeman’s initial sequence, which leads from

‘The Grammar-Translation Method’ to ‘The Direct Method’ to ‘TheAudio-Lingual Method’, is adopted also by Richards and Rodgers in

ELT Journal Volume 66/4 Special issue October 2012; doi:10.1093/elt/ccs036 430© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.

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their initial overview of ‘Major trends in twentieth-century languageteaching’ (Part I of their second edition), although the latter authorsdo give some additional attention to nineteenth-century predecessorsof the Direct Method and to the pre-communicative British tradition ofsituational language teaching.

One problem with viewing the past as a ‘decontextualized,quasi-allegorical procession of methods’ (Smith 2005: xvi) is that thisis fundamentally ahistorical: statements tend to be made according to a‘mythology’ that has been developed around methods, often asa way of stereotyping, indeed demonizing past practices, rather thanbeing well attested in contemporary sources (cf. Stern 1983: 77).Just two brief examples will have to suffice here. Firstly, the label‘Grammar-Translation Method’ has been used for more than a centuryin all types of professional forum as a kind of shorthand for practicesinvolving translation and explicit, deductive grammar teaching, but onlyopponents of such practices seem to have ever used the term (Howattwith Widdowson op.cit.: 151). Reform Movement methodologists

coined it and thereby ‘packaged up’ the practices they disapprovedof in a particular context, at a particular time (Germany, in the latenineteenth century), in the service of a concerted attack upon them.A second example is the way the ‘Direct Method’ label has beenpersistently misused to designate ‘one very basic rule: No translationis allowed’ (Larsen-Freeman op.cit.: 23). This oversimplification seemslargely attributable to a tendency on the part of Anglo-Americanmethodologists, throughout the twentieth century, to associate theDirect Method with the practices adopted in Berlitz schools (cf.Richards and Rodgers op.cit.: 12), to ignore the broader, less dogmatic

principles of ‘direct methodology’ as established for French schools in1901 (see Puren 1988), and, indeed, to ignore the debates—includingwith reference to use or non-use of L1—within the wider movementthat gave rise to them.

Bringing this up to date now, we wish to suggest that similartendencies are at work in the way different strands of debate in the1970s and 1980s around ‘communicative’ and ‘learner-centred’ideas and practices have become ‘methodized’ within current ELTdiscourse—packaged up as a kind of ‘standard CLT’—in part, atleast, to clear the way for self-proclaimed ‘progress’. Evidence that

communicative ideas are being readied in this way for the ‘dustbinof history’ can be found, for example, in Bax’s (2003) ‘The end ofCLT: a context approach to language teaching’, which differs fromHolliday (1994), it would seem, only in the brashness of the author’sproposal for a new named ‘approach’ to replace ‘CLT’ (rather, that is,than build upon affordances within the communicative approach, asHolliday suggests). A similar process seems to be at work in the wayTask-based Language Teaching is increasingly presented as somethingdifferent from communicative language teaching, rather than as arelatively ‘strong version’ of it. Kumaravadivelu (2006: 94–5) seems to

confirm this when he says: ‘As the novelty of communicative languageteaching is gradually wearing thin […], TBLT is gaining ground’.As this quotation additionally suggests, even those least favourable

Unpackaging the past: ‘CLT’ through ELTJ keywords 431

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to the concept of method (Kumaravadivelu being primary amongthem) appear to need the concept to describe the past, viewing CLTas a labelled package, distinct from a post-method condition. Finally,Richards and Rodgers (op.cit.) seem at once conscious of the problemof retrospective oversimplification of CLT and concerned to have itboth ways; in their second (2001) edition, ‘Current communicativeapproaches’ is the heading of the concluding part of the book

(suggesting that we do still live in a communicative era), but the chapteron ‘Communicative language teaching’ that ended the 1986 editionis now presented as describing ‘what we […] might call the “ClassicalView of Communicative Language Teaching”’ (ibid.: 151). However, theidea that there can be a ‘Classical View’ of communicative languageteaching sits uncomfortably with the views expressed in the chapteritself (unchanged from the first edition) that communicative languageteaching is ‘best considered an approach rather than a method’ (ibid.:172) and that ‘There is no single text or authority on it, nor any singlemodel that is universally accepted as authoritative’ (ibid.: 155).

The kind of procession-of-methods view of the past, including therecent past, that we have been both illustrating and critiquing is rarelyquestioned, partly perhaps because there has been so little historicalresearch in support of alternative perspectives. Until now, Stern’s (op.cit.: 84) call for ‘the kind of specialized study needed as a basis for abetter historical perspective’—which is seen by him as an essentialfoundation for the appropriate theorization of language teaching—hasonly rarely been heeded. What we aim to explore in this article, then,is a more rigorous, less ‘mythologizing’ way of viewing the past, as analternative to the methods-based perspective on history that tends to

dominate in our profession. Our study focused on the relatively recentdiscourse of a particular journal (ELTJ itself), thereby constitutinga ‘specialized study’ in Stern’s sense, but one which also aimed toillustrate more broadly how historical research can contribute to thetheorization of language teaching.

Aims of the study In our study, we attempted to analyse a slice of recent professionalhistory with reference to contemporary sources, in order to ascertainwhat ideas were important in the years that are said to have produced‘CLT’. We wished to look at the ‘early communicative period’ from theperspective of how ideas were presented at the time, not from the desireto set up an alternative grand narrative but in an attempt to see whatits characteristic concerns were, bearing in mind the fact that canonicaldescriptions are not easy to identify but also that ‘CLT’ is currently,nevertheless, being ‘packaged up’ and methodized. Our aim was toexamine ideas on their own terms, without necessarily applying a CLTlabel to concepts or assuming a cohesion that may have come to beretrospectively applied. Thus, the guiding questions we sought answersto were as follows:

■ What preoccupations were common (as attested by sources) inthe era that produced the ‘communicative approach’ to languageteaching?

432 Duncan Hunter and Richard Smith

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■ What was distinctively new compared with what had gone before? ■ To what extent, then, was communicative language teaching really an

internally cohesive ‘bundle’ of ideas?

The corpus andthe approach tokeyword analysis

For the purposes of this exploration, a corpus was compiled, comprisingall articles from ELTJ during a period from 1958 to 1986. (‘ELTJ ’ is usedin this article as a ‘catch-all’ term: see below for the journal’s actualtitles in this period.) Only articles were included in the corpus. Reviews,announcements, information for potential contributors, and so on wereexcluded. ELTJ was chosen as the focus of the investigation for severalreasons, the first being that the periodical, founded in 1946, was oldenough to provide articles from the period prior to the emergence ofthe ‘communicative movement’ (Howatt with Widdowson op.cit.: 326).Texts evidencing writers’ preoccupations before this emergence werenecessary to form a comparison with ‘communicative period’ articles.More importantly, it was felt that, of all the sources available, ELTJ best captured insights and ideas from across the language teaching

profession. In a 1973 editorial, W.R. Lee (28/1: 2, 1973)1 explained thathe aimed to publish contributions for ‘language teachers and otherspecialists’, ranging ‘from the article on language-teaching theoryor on a piece of research to the article on classroom procedures andtechniques’. This ethos of inclusion appears to have been continued byRichard Rossner, Lee’s successor as Editor, whose new Advisory Panelincluded academics, representatives of the British Council and leaders inthe burgeoning commercial EFL sector (36/1: front matter, 1981).

In acknowledgement of the fact that this analysis would apply the

particular filter of ELTJ discourse to professional history (rather, thatis, than portray it comprehensively, directly, or ‘transparently’), articleswere organized in a way that reflected changes in the Journal’s ownpast. Texts were therefore grouped into collections that corresponded todistinguishable editorial phases (see Smith 2007):

1 1958–1973. From issue 12/4 of English Language Teaching , whenW. R. Lee first took over as Editor, until the end of Volume 27, atwhich point the title changed to English Language Teaching Journal(ELTJ).

2 1973–1981. The period from the ‘relaunch’ to Lee’s departure in 1981(Volumes 28–35), following which the title changed to ELT Journal .3 1981–1986. The period of Richard Rossner’s editorship (Volumes

36–40).

Following assembly of the texts, the first phase of the investigationwas carried out. This was a computer-based keywords analysis usingWordSmith Tools (Scott 2004) which processed the historicallygrouped collections of articles to identify outstandingly frequent wordsin each. The procedure whereby keywords are identified statisticallyby means of comparison with a ‘reference corpus’ has previously been

shown to be effective in indicating important themes in a text or corpus(Scott and Tribble 2006). The present study attempted to extend thisprinciple of comparison to the identification of historical differences;


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by comparing groups of texts from the same journal but from differenthistorical periods, it was hoped that it would be possible to identifyoverall changes in theme.

The big picture:1981–1986 versus

1958–1973 keywords

A series of keyword tables was compiled by comparing each collection(as a ‘test corpus’) against one other (as a ‘reference’), in every possible

combination. Of the six resulting keyword lists, the 1981–1986versus 1958–1973 comparison, shown in Table 1 below, seemed tobe of particular interest. The 1981–1986 corpus represents a periodby which time the communicative approach had, according to theliterature, emerged as a recognizable phenomenon (indeed, Howattwith Widdowson (op.cit.) identify the 1970s as the first ‘communicativedecade’). The 1958–1973 reference corpus, by contrast, is composedof articles that can be assumed to be more or less ‘innocent’ ofcommunicative ideas. By identifying newly prominent words, the1981–1986 versus 1958–1973 comparison seemed to give a usefulpreliminary indication of conceptual shifts that had occurred inprofessional discourse between the two periods.

Rank Keyword Keyness

1 communicative 1458.70

2 learner 1126.20

3 activity 679.93

4 student 616.94

5 task 516.57

6 text 497.08

7 ELT 449.20

8 syllabus 406.44

9 focus 387.89

10 strategy 381.75

table 1

Top ten words in the1981–1986 versus1958–1973 lemma list

The prominence of communicative in this table, overwhelmingly themost important item in the keyword list, seemed to confirm the viewthat the early movement was one dominated by the ‘single powerfulidea’ (Howatt with Widdowson op.cit.: 250) of communication,although it is interesting that, by 1981–1986 at least, it was theadjective (collocating particularly with ‘competence’, ‘approach’, and‘activities’) that predominated in ELTJ discourse, rather than the nouncommunication (no. 18 in the list).

More pertinently to the aims of the study, the data appeared to

confirm Richards and Rodgers’ (op.cit.) portrayal of events, in whichcommunicative ideas effected an upheaval in ELT professionaldiscourse. Indeed, many parallels with their account could be drawn.


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Concerning the high ranking of learner , Richards and Rodgers’ (ibid.:166) mini-history of CLT describes a substantial shift towards alearner-centred perspective. The prominence of activity and task in thedata also seems to strongly support their view that the adoption of avariety of ‘task-based communication activities’ along with games, roleplays, and simulations was a central, practical feature of the approach(ibid.: 169). Of further interest was the list of keywords derived by

reversing the procedure used to generate the results shown in Table 1,now using the oldest (1958–1973) collection as the test corpus and themost recent (1981–1986) articles as a reference. By testing for keywordsin reverse chronological order (see Table 2 below), it was possible toidentify words that had become less prominent. Once again, it was easyto identify parallels with Richards and Rodgers’ version of events. Inparticular, the inclusion of items such as drill , laboratory, and pattern accorded with these writers’ description of a decline in concern forgrammar patterns and techniques of structural drilling. Richards andRodgers (ibid.: 44–6, 59–62) explain that earlier approaches were

essentially drill- and pattern-based and report the view that in CLT‘drilling may occur, but peripherally’ (ibid.: 156).

table 2

Top ten words in the1958–1973 versus1981–1986 lemma list

Rank Keyword Keyness

1 he 609.43

2 English 513.16

3 his 362.01

4

pupil 334.51

5 sound 281.75

6 drill 207.57

7 laboratory 205.72

8 be 204.95

9 pattern 200.82

10 vowel 172.17

Uncoveringcomplexity:qualitative analysis ofkeywords in context

Once we had arrived at the 1981–1986 versus 1958–1973 keyword list asa starting point, the next step was to look more deeply and carefully intothe history of prominent words so as to ascertain their actual role withinELTJ discourse. Corpus techniques necessarily extract and isolatewords from the meaning-giving context of their original environment(Hunston 2002; Baker 2006). Using the WordSmith Tools Concordprogram to locate keyword occurrences, then reading the completearticles in which they appeared, a ‘word-history’ for each highly rankeditem was compiled. ‘Word-history’ is our way of referring to a processwhereby data that had been stripped from their textual environment

by the keywords procedure can be recontextualized via a combinationof concordancing and ‘by eye’ procedures. A much more detailed andconsidered assessment of the role individual keywords played in each


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period could thereby be formed. In several cases, this analysis pointedto much greater continuity between periods, in terms of the underlyingconceptual content of the discussions preoccupying writers, than oursurface investigation of terms had at first indicated.

Referring back:

learner , task , andactivity

Two particular phenomena were observable which supported this

view of underlying historical continuity. The first was that learner , thesecond most prominent keyword in our main list, appears to have beendiscussed earlier than, and independently of ‘communicativeness’. Itis frequently implied that learner-centredness is a core characteristic ofthe communicative approach (for example Ellis 36/2: 73, 1982), but theword-history for learner revealed that this emphasis had a provenancequite independent of the communicative discussion itself. In themid-1970s, both Elliott (28/3: 189–97, 1974) and Saitz (28/3: 220–1,1974) describe the period in which they are writing as one in whichconcern for learner psychology has begun to revive after a lengthy

period of neglect. The keyword learner collocates quite frequentlywith ‘motivation’ in the 1973–1981 period, and the notion of learnermotivation comes to be discussed with increasing enthusiasm andtheoretical sophistication by a number of authors. Nation (29/2: 115–20,1975) introduces the concepts of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ motivation(ibid.: 115) and Alatis (30/4: 265–82, 1976) extends this theoretical basewith reference to instrumental and integrative types of motivation (ibid.:268), while Allwright (31/4: 267–74, 1977) argues that motivation poses‘the key problem for the language teacher’ (ibid.: 267). Perhaps the bestillustration of the ascendancy of learner motivation as a particularly

important idea in the 1970s is Foldberg’s (32/1: 15–23, 1977) passionateespousal of ‘true, inner motivation as the be-all and end-all of successfullanguage learning’ (ibid.: 15). Thus, according to word-history evidence,later writers on the central role of the learner within the communicativeapproach were espousing ideas that were already well in place and thatseem to have evolved within a wholly independent discussion.

A second example of historical continuity is the way some conceptsappeared to persist in the discourse between periods but came tobe labelled by new terms. The word-histories for the keywords task and activity made clear that, whereas contributors in the 1973–1981period refer less frequently to ‘tasks’ or ‘activities’ than 1981–1986contributors, many of the elements of the discussion that later cameto surround these terms could be identified in articles concerned with‘games’. Indeed, as early as 1969, W. R. Lee—himself the author ofseveral books about classroom games (for example Lee 1976)—wrotean editorial (34/1: 1, 1969) distinguishing British language teachingmethods from their American, audiolingual counterparts partly on thebasis of their inclusion of activities that involve ‘using the language tocommunicate with others’ (ibid.: 1). In the 1973–1981 corpus, writerswho evidence no interest in or contact with communicative ideas are

nevertheless enthusiastic advocates of game-oriented lessons. Rees(29/2: 135–43, 1975) typifies this tendency, describing 12 different kindsof question-asking games, more than one of which is clearly a role play


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or simulation, while another, in which an image is withheld and thenpartially revealed by the teacher so as to stimulate student responses,has many of the features of an ‘information gap’ as described by writersin the 1981–1986 period (for example Harmer 36/3: 164–8, 1982).What is particularly interesting about these earlier articles is that gamesare frequently justified on the same grounds as later communicative‘tasks’ and ‘activities’. Rees (op.cit.: 136) himself suggests that games

provide an opportunity to relieve students from excessive teachercontrol. Games make language learning more ‘democratic’, and theduty of teachers ‘is clearly to provide practice for all our pupils’. Healso demonstrates a concern for what would later be described asauthenticity, recognizing as a limitation of two of his games the factthat ‘they are unreal in the sense that the questioner is already aware ofthe answer before he asks the question’ (op.cit.: 138).

Shifts in reference:

communicative andsyllabus

Taking into account the contents of the word-histories referred toabove, it seems reasonable to assert that, beneath the surface ofterminological upheaval, some of the ideas now associated with CLTwere rooted in earlier discourse. When examining communicative,however, the ‘super-keyword’ in Table 1, it was possible to discernthe converse of this phenomenon: discontinuity within the discussionsurrounding the term. Tracing the associations of the term in ELTJ articles, it is possible to identify two phases that are almost asdistinct from one another as from the foregoing ‘pre-communicative’period. The first is reflected in the 1973–1981 collection of articles,when ‘communicative’ and ‘notional’ or ‘functional’ often appear asinterchangeable terms. Thus, in the first ELTJ article to include the

phrase ‘communicative language teaching’, Black and Butzkamm(32/4: 270–4, 1978) equate this with the development of materialsaccording to ‘notional categories’ (ibid.: 272). Even by the endof the subsequent 1981–1986 period, the association between acommunicative approach to language teaching and notional-functionalprinciples of linguistic description is never wholly thrown off. In1985, Swan (39/2: 76–87, 1985) suggests that ‘for many people thecentral idea in communicative language teaching is probably that ofa “semantic syllabus”’ (ibid.: 78). Later in his article, Swan indeedcomplains that the ‘new toy’ effect of the approach ‘is leading us to

look at everything in functional terms’ (ibid.: 81).

On the other hand, in the pages of ELTJ at least, it was also during the1981–1986 period that the beginnings of a second phase can be identified,as the simple conflation of communicative teaching with functionalprinciples came to be challenged. Thus, Ellis (36/2: 73–81, 1982) appearsto make a deliberate effort to move the communicative discussion awayfrom its notional-functional roots. Harmer (36/3: 164–8, 1982) alsoseems to go out of his way to break with the earlier, notional-functionalformulation, even commenting that ‘[T]here is, after all, nothing

especially communicative about teaching functions!’ (ibid.: 165). The label‘communicative’, he suggests, can in fact only be considered with respectto activities (ibid.). Within the space of a few years what communicative


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represents has undergone a considerable shift within the pages of ELTJ :the term has become contested and is a site of rapid change.

This shift of focus, not to say tension, within the communicativediscussion is also clearly evident when looking at incidences of anotherprominent keyword, syllabus. In particular, in articles reviewingN. S. Prabhu’s Communicational Teaching Project (then being

conducted in southern India), there is a clear sense that any earlierconsensus concerning the nature of a communicative approachhas become fragmented. In the most ‘anti-functional’ of these,Greenwood (39/4: 268–73, 1985) notes, with obvious satisfaction,the project’s rejection of notional-functional, as well as structural,approaches to syllabus design (ibid.:268). It is clear that, by the endof the period represented in the corpus, ideas regarding the nature of‘communicativeness’ and of ‘syllabus’, had floated free of their earlieranchoring in notional-functional syllabus design.

Conclusion:

delabelling,unpackaging,demethodizingthe past

Did, then, the ideas that were discussed in the pages of ELTJ in the 1970s

and 1980s contribute to as chronologically distinct, internally cohesiveand ‘settled’ an approach as a methods-based perspective on the pastmight nowadays be suggesting? One aim of our investigation was toanalyse ELTJ articles as a means of discovering the extent to which thecoming to prominence of new ideas actually constituted a revolutionin professional discourse. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the way weattempted to combine a qualitative with a quantitative approach, it isdifficult to propose simple conclusions. On the one hand, the quantitativedata generated within the first, statistical, keyword phase of the projectappear to bear out a sense of dramatic change in which old concepts

are ejected and new ideas vigorously taken up. On the other hand,confidence in this view declines when the word-histories developedduring the second, qualitative phase of the project, are considered. Theconclusions suggested by statistical keyword analysis—based on shifts inthe prominence of terms on the surface of professional discourse—oftendiverged from those emerging when we constructed word-histories byviewing keywords in the context of the articles in which they appeared.

Despite shifts in terminology, it was possible to discern underlyingcontinuity in ideas from a previous period. In the case of the keyword

communicative, another phenomenon was revealed: the term rose newlyto prominence and maintained its dominance, but we found that theway it was used shifted dramatically within the period most associatedwith the emergence of ‘the’ communicative approach. This, too,seemed to contradict—in a different way—any notion of there havingbeen a ‘unitary’ CLT in the 1980s, at least where the central idea of‘communicativeness’ is concerned.

This is, of course, what advocates of communicative language teachinghave tended to claim all along: that it is in fact an ‘approach’ allowing ofdifferent emphases and different procedures, rather than a prescriptive

‘method’. The views of originators of ideas are, however, commonlyneglected in the seemingly relentless search for the ‘new’ thatcharacterizes ELT discourse, and, as we suggested in the Introduction,


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the communicative approach has—like other ideas and practices fromthe past—become increasingly ‘methodized’, reduced in representationto a standard or ‘Classical’ version of ‘CLT’.

As an antidote to this tendency, we have argued for a delabelling,unpackaging, indeed demethodizing approach to the past, illustratedby our deconstruction of emerging over-static, oversimplified notions

of what characterizes or characterized ‘CLT’ but with an application, byextension, to many past methods. The close reference to contemporarysources that we have been advocating will, we hope, be adopted by anincreasing number of researchers, whom we envisage reaching withus into the so-called dustbin (we would prefer to say ‘store house’ or‘treasure chest’!) of history, removing the labels on method packagesand unbundling them, all in the service of recovering the professionalpast and recycling it as a complex and usable resource for the present.

Note1 ELTJ articles in the corpus are not included in

our list of references. Instead, bibliographicaldetails are provided within the text as follows:volume and issue number, followed by pagenumber(s), then publication year.

References

Baker, P. 2006. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis.

London: Continuum.Bax, S. 2003. ‘The end of CLT: a context approachto language teaching’. ELT Journal 57/3: 278–87.Holliday, A. 1994. Appropriate Methodology andSocial Context . Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.Howatt, A. P. R. [with H. G. Widdowson]. 2004.A History of English Language Teaching (secondedition; first edition, 1984, by A. P. R. Howattalone). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hunston, S. 2002. Corpora in Applied Linguistics.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Kumaravadivelu, B. 2006. Understanding LanguageTeaching: From Method to Postmethod . Mahwah,NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Larsen-Freeman, D. 1986/2000. Techniques andPrinciples in Language Teaching (second edition).Oxford: Oxford University Press.Lee, W. R. 1976. Language Teaching Games andContests. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Puren, C. 1988. Histoire des méthodologies del’enseignement des langues. Paris: Nathan-Clé

International.Richards, J. C. and T. S. Rodgers. 1986/2001.Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching

(second edition). Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.Scott, M. 2004. WordSmith Tools Version 4.Oxford: Oxford University Press.Scott, M. and C. Tribble. 2006. Textual Patterns:Key Words and Corpus Analysis in LanguageEducation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Smith, R. C. 2005. ‘Introduction’ in R.C. Smith(ed.). Teaching English as a Foreign Language,1936–1961, five volumes. Abingdon: Routledge.

Smith, R. C. 2007. ‘The origins of ELT Journal’.Available at http://www.oxfordjournals.org/eltj/about.html (accessed on 20 September 2011).Stern, H. H. 1983. Fundamental Concepts of LanguageTeaching . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The authorsDuncan Hunter is a Lecturer at UniversityCollege Plymouth St Mark & St John.Previously, he worked at the University of

Warwick, where he completed a PhD on thehistory of the communicative approach. Hehas research interests in language teachingmethodology, corpus analysis of texts, and ELThistory.Email: [email protected]

Richard Smith is an Associate Professor at theUniversity of Warwick. He is the founder of theWarwick ELT archive (www.warwick.ac.uk/go/elt_archive) and has published and presented

widely on the history of language teaching, learnerautonomy, and teacher development.Email: [email protected]


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